My kneejerk reaction would have been rather, "I suspected you meant that one". I can certainly see a connection, but I wouldn't want to go so far as to conclude the Shargash was the Greater God of Annihilation/Void, with only an also-ran connection to Death. (Such a characterisation would weaken his ostensible identification with Tolat, who is fairly consistently described as a Death/Fertility entity.)
> >While Shargash has his own rune, I'd have said that Shargash's
> >primary "core rune" association was clearly Death.
>
> Shargash however is both a Great God and not Humakt. Even
> his "death" is not separation and division (ST p90) but
> universal destruction. So I do not believe his core
> nature corresponds to Death.
I think this "proof" rests on the (IMO incorrect) assumption that the divine world can be rendered discrete in some objective way. (Obviously it can be rendered discrete in any number of subjectively satisfactory ways: that's more or less a given for successful theistic worship.) The starkest example of the problems with such exercises is perhaps the Dendara/Entekos "problem". If one were to try and construct a non-theist, but truly "universalist" model of the relationship between the powers the lie behind the theist entities, I think one would have to say that indeed, Humakt and Shargash cannot be "identified" (and nor can Shargash and Orlanth, some to that...), but that's not to say there's no "deep" connection between them.
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